Public Randomness and Randomness Beacons

a16zcrypto.com

20 pointsimartin2k3 comments

Am I wrong and this article include false statements on purpose?

"The concept of a VRF was introduced by Micali, Rabin, and Vadhan in 1999" [1] now the article says that is was pioneered by the DFinity Blockchain launched in 2021 while Algorand was launched in 2019 and coincidentally uses VRF and was also created by Micali.

A decentralized incentivized fact checker [2] would be great to cope with this kind of high authority/page-rank (a16z) articles misleading readers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_random_function

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+fact+checker&o...

Likewise, the 'essentially the same' drand is a 2017 paper https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2017/papers/413.pdf and the league of entropy has been running since 2019, so hard to know exactly what the additional pioneering was in 2021.

It is also good to highlight that the Algorand paper is from 2016 and their testnet was working since 2018.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com